The Essential Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2025
By Emily SmithDec 13
Brandwatch React has had a solid year, enlightening over 600,000 individual readers with our exclusive data-driven stories.
In case you weren’t sure, React is a sub-brand of Brandwatch that’s interested in telling stories with our data on anything related to pop culture and public affairs. You might know us by our data visualizations and tweets, but our blogs are where the most action is at.
In the spirit of celebrating our successes, we thought we’d look back on five data stories that made the biggest splashes this year and how they came to bring in the number of readers they did.
Brandwatch React’s biggest hits of 2017
5. United Airlines Mentions Exceed 1.5 Million in a Day As Passenger Dragged From Plane
United Airlines saw a large (and negative) reaction on social media after footage surrounding a man being dragged from one of its planes went viral in April.
Our post hit the front page of Reddit, sending nearly 20k people to read our report.
4. Doctor Who 13: How the World Reacted to the New, Female, Doctor
BBC’s beloved Doctor was announced to be regenerating, with a brand new person playing the role. But some people didn’t seem too impressed.
We found that the disappointed reactions were largely in the minority despite the negative press covfefe, with only around 20% of the sentiment-categorized mentions being negative.
16.6k upvotes on Reddit and a helpful tweet from @CaitlinMoran later, and we had 25k views.
3. Data Reveals the Extent of the Backlash to the Kendall Jenner Pepsi Ad
This was another April big hitter for the Brandwatch React team.
Redditors were happy to upvote our story that provided data on the magnitude of the reaction against Pepsi’s controversial ad, bringing us nearly 45k readers.
2. Things Millennials Are Killing, According to Twitter
We noticed that Millennials’ murderous ways had become a bit of a meme in itself, so we decided to give it the Brandwatch React treatment.
It didn’t take long for the post to hit Reddit’s front page, bringing in 100k Millennial-curious readers looking find out what was at the top of the list.
1. Thousands React to Mario’s Nipples in Super Mario Odyssey Promotion
When we started the year, I didn’t think that an article written speedily that covered (or uncovered) social’s response to Super Mario baring his nipples for the first time would be our most read blog post of the year, but that’s the internet for you.
A well timed Reddit post launched a trickle of interest that soon became more than a quarter of a million views. I’m told Brandwatch now ranks on Google for “super nipples”, although I wouldn’t advise you search for it.
And all without spending a single dollar on promotion
Well, just our wages…
We didn’t spend any money promoting the above posts at all, but there were a couple of common factors at play.
Firstly, they each feature data that adds value to conversations as opposed to just adding another voice. Having access to a social listening tool like Brandwatch, which can produce exclusive, insightful data on almost any subject, makes it much easier for our content to get noticed. Brandwatch also makes it easier for us to track how our content is doing and find out when our it’s taking off on social.
Secondly, we posted them on Reddit and they took off big time. By no means does posting your content on Reddit get you thousands of blog posts every time (in fact, prepare for failure most of the time). But sometimes you get the right subreddit at the right time and you’re rewarded heavily. Just don’t read the comments.
We put together a number of posts on how to succeed at using Reddit for promoting your content this year. You can find one for beginners here and one for those sold on Reddit’s potential here.
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